Trisha Pritikin: Hanford Downwinder

I was born and raised in Richland, Washington, immediately downwind of the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in southeastern Washington State.  Hanford produced the plutonium used in the world’s first test of an atomic bomb, the Trinity Test, July 16, 1945, and in Fat Man, the atomic bomb that decimated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.  

Hanford produced plutonium during the wartime Manhattan Project and ensuing Cold War, secretly releasing ionizing radiation to the air throughout the Pacific Northwest, and into the waters of the Columbia River over more than forty years, beginning in late 1944.  

Hanford’s radiation releases were not revealed until, responding to mounting public pressure in February of 1986, the US Department of Energy declassified 19,000 pages of early Hanford operating records. 

After an official government report acknowledged that these records revealed that Hanford’s radiation releases were significant enough to have caused cancers and other diseases in downriver and downwind populations, over five thousand civilian “downwinders” filed personal injury toxic tort suits against former Hanford contractors.  These individuals suffered from a range of cancers, autoimmune diseases, birth defects, reproductive disorders, and other serious health issues. I was one of those plaintiffs. I lost my entire family to radiogenic cancers. I have autoimmune thyroiditis (Hashimoto’s) and hypoparathyroidism (which means I lost my parathyroid glands and am at risk for tetany, seizures, and kidney failure as the result).  When precancerous Hurthle cells were found in nodules on my thyroid, I had a complete thyroidectomy. 

Many of the cancers and other diseases suffered by the downwinders, when diagnosed in nuclear workers, are recognized under federal law as radiation-related.  Nuclear workers with these cancers and other diseases can file claims for compensation and lifetime health care. Hanford downwinders, in contrast, are not currently eligible for compensation or health care under federal or state law, even though their exposures often occurred during infancy and childhood, when they were most vulnerable to radiation. 

Throughout nearly twenty-five years of litigation, three bellwether (representative plaintiff) trials were held, resulting in jury verdicts for two plaintiffs with thyroid cancer.  The public was made aware of the stories of only the three bellwether plaintiffs. Thousands of stories of multiple cancers and other serious radiogenic disease remain unheard. 

Only a portion of the plaintiffs received settlements.  In late 2015, I realized that, with conclusion of the litigation, our stories would vanish from the public eye.  I could not let this happen. Our stories needed to be preserved and made accessible to the public.  The public needed to understand the suffering that our government, through its nuclear weapons program, a program that operated in the absence of state and federal regulation and without public oversight, had caused.  

The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice, published February of 2020 by University Press of Kansas, is the result.  Net proceeds benefit CORE, Consequences of Radiation Exposure, a Washington State nonprofit and IRS 501(c)(3) organization.